along the way at which one stops for a possible, as you enter the choir, and find period longer or shorter; and of the ter-it vilely fitted up as the parish church. minus at which you finally stop, the journey ended.

Go out and see that beautiful ruin of a cathedral, standing within the verge of a ducal park. Mourn over the roof less nave, with its graceful tower at the western end. Mourn yet more, if it be | Salisbury! NEW SERIES-Vol. III., No. 5.

a thing, very proper to be done, because you fancy that, which otherwise yon would not do at all. And very unwillingly the conviction forces its way sometimes that the present is but a wayside station. Has it not come to the heart, now and then, like a sharp dagger? Even when not so bad as that, it is often bad enough. You make a pretty house. You paint it to your mind: and on your lobby floor you lay down encaustic tiles of pleasing pattern. You set up your bookcases, not unfrequently having such made for little corners, so that they will not do anywhere else. You accumulate and arrange your household gods. You grow, morally, into the shape of the room in which you write and read for many years. What associations cluster round that abode! Was there a room, whence it was very long before the smell of fresh wood would go: the room where, through some cold winter days, a sweet smiling little face lay in the little coffin? A thousand ties bind you to a

Yet before going on to these things, let us give a thought, kindly reader, to the fashion in which we fancy that as to our place in life we have got to the terminus, when in fact we are merely stopping, in a little while to move, at a roadside station. Have not we all done this? The writer, for one, more than once. Did he ever think to leave that beautiful city wherein he wrote full many a page of this magazine; or to leave that plain and indeed shabby church wherein, twice on each Sunday, he preached for six years? Sore, indeed, he felt, when friends from other lands freely expressed to him their mind concerning that edifice: specially when a dear friend, rector of an English parish which has a beautiful church, being asked what he thought of the church which bears the Mellifluous Doctor's name, said, "Well, I don't regard it so much as a church, but rather as a place of shelter from the weather!" But the force of circumstances pushed him on; and after all, that pleasant resting-dwelling even in a town: remembrances place proved to be no more than a roadside station. Perhaps the quaint and ancient city, cathedral city and university city in one, which is now his charge, may prove the like too. It was indeed the terminus of each of the good men who went before me, and it may very well be mine too. Not in this country's bounds will you find a fairer scene, or more congenial duty. Some folk do not care for such things; but to the author it is a very real and tangible privilege to be one of those who conduct the services of a church, on the ground contained within which Christian men, in different ways indeed, have worshipped for eight hundred years. Once that church had thirty clergymen : now it has but two. Once, its chief official was termed an archbishop: now, its two incumbents bear each the title of minister. But the archbishops were sometimes murdered, and sometimes hanged. From such perils the humbler existing dignitaries are happily free. And Cardinal or Lord Primate had oftentimes the care of the nation on his hands, while the duty nowadays is not national but parochial.

It is well, doubtless, that people should fancy their stopping place, for the moment, their terminus. You do many

of words and looks that are gone; of unexpected glad news, of silent unutterable sorrow; of youthful shouts and laughter, of maturer smiles and tears. But in town you have but the indoor associations: in the country there are the evergreens you planted, the walks you devised, the roses you trained and the ivy, the green grass mowed unceasingly, beside which you have often stood under an umbrella, and watched it gaining a more emerald verdure under a soft summer shower. How that gravel has been beaten by your feet: what races you have run, chasing your little children, over that turf: how it gladdened you to come back after a little absence to this place, which was to you the centre of all the world! And now you are to be pulled up by the roots from all the holds to which the roots have fastened themselves. Yes, it takes a tremendous pull from the great locomotive of circumstances to move you from the roadside station which you had taken for the terminus! And it is always a strange thing, and a sad thing, to recall that scene. Many are the lines in Philip Van Artevelde that linger on the ear and heart, and come back like an unwearying refrain to a hundred things one thinks of: none more than these:

"There is a door in Ghent- I passed beside | honorable and elevated as a British sub

it:

A threshold there, worn of my frequent feet,

Which I shall cross no more."

In the years spent under that roof with his gentle Adriana, Artevelde doubtless thought he had reached the terminus; but a tremendous tug moved him on from that; and from the sunshiny garden of roses he had to go to wild moorlands, black and bare. But if you want to read the most touching of all accounts of how a man took a roadside station for the terminus, you may find it in a book where there is sublimer poetry than Mr. Henry Taylor's: turn up the twenty-ninth chapter of Job. Yes, the patient patriarch recalls fondly the wayside station: tells of all the things that made it so pleasant: tells how certainly he counted upon its being the terminus: tells how he was pushed away from it into dreary desolation. Read all that: it is too long to quote; and this is not the place. But as for the dwelling you left, some day you go back again to see it. Probably you feel it would have been better if you had not. Perhaps your walks, once so trim, are grown up with weeds. Perhaps the dear old evergreens have grown, unpruned, into awkward monsters, in which you cannot recognize the old features at all. Perhaps, where there was green turf, the delight of your heart, overhanging branches and hateful hens have destroyed it all. Perhaps you sit down for half an hour, alone, on the steps once your own, and recall the past. Then you shake your head several times: and leave the spot, to return no more.

ject can hold. But, having reached that dignified terminus, he returned once on a time to visit the roadside station in his life where he had spent his early years: and he silently walked about the old ways. Then, he entered the house of an old friend: a lady who had known him all his life. Said she, "Well, Lord A., you have been seeing the old place: what do you think of it ?" And the good man, in the zenith of fame and success could answer only by covering his face with his hands, and crying like a little child. That is what you think and feel, going back to a wayside station long since left forever. A day like this which I have left, Full thirty years behind," is always a wonderful day to look back upon, however ordinary it was when it was passing.

All this is introductory to my proper subject. It is as concerns our opinions and feelings that I desire to think of roadside stations and the terminus ad quem. Many opinions, many feelings and affections, which we thought we should keep all our life, we outgrow. We come not to care a brass farthing for things, places, people, we thought we should care for all our days. You, young fellow, who were engaged to be married thirteen times, fancied that each new engagement was the terminus; in fact, it was merely a station at which you stopped a little while. You, old party, about to be married for the seventh time, have learned that all the previous marriages were no more than roadside stations. You honestly deemed each If Artevelde had gone back to that the terminus in its own day. You would dwelling, not to be revisited, you see have indignantly repudiated the suggeswhat a gush of remembrances would have tion that it was anything else. You, rushed over him, and broken him down gentle young girl, when your judicious. for the time. Yes, it is a curious thing and matter-of fact parents broke off your to go back from what you meanwhile engagement with a lad who had not a esteem your terminus, to see a roadside penny wherewith to bless either himself station, whence you departed, long ago. or you, thought you would never get For though the present location you hold over that dreadful disappointment: you be a great deal better, the old one will would wear the willow through life. yet pierce you through. There was a Ah, life is very long: much longer than man, the son of the clergyman of a lit- young people have any idea; by and by tle Scotch country town, who left his na- you will think better of it, and judge a tive scenes,and went to a certain great me- great deal more wisely; you will be tropolis. There, by great industry, great pulled out of that eminently unsatisfacability, and great good luck, he push-tory rut in which at present you are ed his way, till he arrived at a place as stuck; and will advance prosperously

A young fellow once told me that he had finally made up his mind that he never would argue with anybody on any topic. Argument, he said, never affected opinion; because general opinion does not found on reason, but on sentiment and constitution; and people get angry when argued with, but are not convinced. "I never," he said, "would take the trouble of expressing my own views, however sure I might be that they were right: I would keep them to myself: it is all no use and no matter." When I heard him say all this, I thought to myself, "Ah, you are stopping at a little station high up in the hills: in a little while you will move on, and glide down to the place held by ordinary beings." So he did: and, indeed, went on farther than most people do. If you should fall in with him now, you would find him keenly disposed to an argument, and eager to thrust his views upon you. I do not know whether he expects his fellow-creatures to be convinced by his reasons; but at least he makes sure that they shall hear them.

along the rails again, to the halting | tion of sound common sense. He is the place of your next engagement (let us embodiment of a supremely wise Mrs. trust) to a sensible, amiable, and compe- Grundy. If, in taste and philosophy, tently-wealthy man. And, going to more you have come to hold by him, you may philosophic thoughts, you know how trust that you have reached the terminus the most vital changes pass on our opin- beyond which you will not go. ions on all things. It is not that you reason yourself out of your old views, or into your new ones; it is just that you grow into them. You glide away. You fancied yourself securely anchored; but you were drifting all the while. When Dr. Newman published hard things against the Church of Rome, he fancied that these views so expressed were his terminus. Others, looking at him, saw what he did not himself see, that his position was no more than a small refreshment station, with eight minutes allowed, at the top of a very steep incline; and that in a little while the train would be tearing away at great speed to what Dr. Newman now thinks right and what he then thought wrong. No one can read his Apologia, especially in that second edition, in which the undue bitterness with which he resented the attack of "a popular writer of the day " is in great degree mitigated and removed, without having the firmest assurance of that eminent man's entire honesty of purpose; and few (may it be said?) can read it without wondering that he ever dreamed that the manifestly provisional and temporary views he held, and which he was ever modifying, were those which would endure with him; wondering that he took for the terminus what you could see with half an eye had the rails stretching on far ahead; what was, in short, a roadside station.

I cannot but say, that it seems to me that any opinion that differs very much from the usual way of thinking, even if the opinion be magnanimous and right, is likely to prove a roadside station. A continual force, constant as that of gravitation, is ever bearing on the man who holds the exceptional view; and that force will probably beat him in the end. Goethe, Schiller, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all started by thinking very differently from mankind at large, and ended by thinking very much as do people in general. Shakespeare, with all his immeasurable depth of thought and power of mind, did not hold exceptional opinions. His views are the glorifica

So with a young fellow who was used to declare that he had no ambition; that he did not care for success, standing, or fortune. He honestly thought he did not: for the grapes we cannot get do really seem sour: they are not falsely called so, in many cases. You know it, my reader: you have no estimate at all of the thing you never can reach; or you estimate it slightly. But let success come, or wealth, or reputation: and you will go down the ringing rails till you reach the level of the ordinary way of thinking among ordinary folk. It is exceedingly pleasant, after all, to succeed, to grow rich, to be well esteemed. Not. but that the best and noblest that is in our nature is brought out by disappointment and failure, rightly met, rightly used. Poor and shallow will that character be which has been formed in the unbroken sunshine of a lot in which all goes well. Yet we should all like to be formed into something good, with just as little trituration as may be.